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Transmedia Storytelling with Glee from Fox

Transmedia storytelling is a new form of media that is exploding and you may not even know it. As explained in the article “Transmedia Storytelling 101” by Henry Jenkins, the many ways shows use trans media is thru webisodes, character twitter accounts, character blogs, web comics, minigames, and wikis. Certain television shows may use them all or just one of them. Glee is a hit television show that is aired of Fox. Glee has separate twitter accounts for each of their characters which can be seen in the images at the end. This is a form of hypertext fiction. Glee uses twitter and acts as there character for each twitter account. For example, a character named Rachel Berry who is a performer. While she is in high school she is trying to be discovered. Glee during this season made a tweet on her character account and tweeted “In the meantime, I’ll do my makeup and see if I can get discovered at the Manhattan mall”. As you can see this shows the character Rachel Berry acting as her normal self. This tweet does not add to the story. But some of them do. Multiform storytelling is when a show uses transmedia in different story telling ways. Glee does a small amount of this but none the less they do it. In one of the latest episodes, Glee aired an episode where the students of the Glee Club coached by the character Will Schuester go out and play softball for some fun time. But before the episode was played, Will Schuester tweeted “I bet you guys didn’t know that I’m really good at slow-pitch softball.” This added to the story showing that this character was thinking about this. This form of trans media is an in-character social media account. So this cannot alter the whole plot of the show Glee. I however think that it does in fact add to the story. When you watch a show you are under the impression that anything that happens in that television screen is the characters life. But anything that is put on the web for a reason adds to the story. No matter how little or how big it does this, it changed the perception we have for the characters because it changes the identity of the character closer to real life.

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One comment on “Transmedia Storytelling with Glee from Fox”

The first paragraph does a good job introducing the reader to Jenkins’s text and providing examples of types of transmedia storytelling. Providing a clear definition of transmedia within the first paragraph could improve the blog post by filling in a reader who might be unfamiliar with the term. The definition of multiform storytelling might be more effective if it were moved to the first paragraph, where there are examples. The definition might not be clear to readers unfamiliar with the term, and it might be a good place to utilize passages from the reading to create a clear definition of the term. One thing that could improve the post would be consistency. Early in the post, the text explains that the Twitter accounts don’t add to the story; at the end of the post, the text explains that any web activity adds to the story. Another thing that could improve the text would be to engage more with the readings throughout; though the text uses terms from the readings, it doesn’t always cite those texts or define the terms. Be sure to define terms like hypertext fiction so the readers who might be unfamiliar with these terms will still understand your points. Defining hypertext fiction might also help create a clear connection between the term and its application to the Twitter accounts, which isn’t explained. There is an opportunity here to discuss migratory cues, especially in the case of Schuster’s tweet.